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I think the point he is trying to mke is that if most people recognise that money does not measure useflness, i.e that the money price of a product is not a measure of its real worth to someone or to people in general, why don't they then conclude that the way to end this is to establish a communist society in which there woud be no money to distort things. The $64,000 dollar quesion of course.

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I apologise profusely, but this correspondence must send now. I wish you the best of success in your endeavours.

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And they call us utopian !

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We noticed the same thing about his speech at Occupy St Pauls in London in 2011 as those Trotskyists. See:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/general-discussion/occupy-movement?page=9#comment-288

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Professor Aumann wrote:

Prof. Aumann apologises profusely, but he must end this correspondence now. He wishes you the best of success in your endeavours.

That's an understandable reply.

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David Harvey's view have been discussed many times in this forum (just type his name into the search box). Some of his stuff his good, e.g his 2007 book The Limits to Capital and this from another of his books the Enigma of Capital:

Quote:

Capitalism will never fall on its own. It will have to be pushed. The accumulation of capital will never cease. It will have to be stopped. The capitalist class will never willingly surrender its power. It will have to be dispossessed.

But while he explains the macoeconomics of capitalism well enough he falls down when it comes to its microeconomics. The Critisticuffs group have made a similar criticism of Harvey not understanding Marx's theory of value:https://critisticuffs.org/texts/david-harvey/How could he, when as they point, he ends up advocating a form of money that cannot be accumulated, what he calls "oxidisable" money? As they quote him:

Quote:

if you want to prevent class formation, if you want to prevent the individual appropriation of social value, then you would have to come up with a money form that is anti accumulation. Marx says that gold and silver are the money commodities because they are not oxidisable. […] They maintain their character. You can accumulate value, social power. And we see what happens in societies. But if you had a money form that dissolved, that is oxidisable, we would end up with a very different kind of society. You would have a money form that would aid circulation but that would not facilitate accumulation. (David Harvey on Platypus panel Radical Interpretations of the Present Crisis, 14 November 2012

and

Quote:

So we’ve got to change the monetary system – either tax away any surpluses people are beginning to get or come up with a monetary system which dissolves and cannot be stored, like air miles (http://www.redpepper.org.uk/david-harvey-interview-the-importance-of-postcapitalist-imagination).

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Here's a comment on this from the author of the article on blockchains in the December Socialist Standard:

Quote:

Seems to me this is a bit similar to the Facebook 'crisis', where the platform has been exploited for unforeseen purposes, and that the solution is also the same: close the gaps to prevent it. If a block is only 80 bytes and therefore it can't store pictures directly but only links (leaving aside the legal grey area of whether a link to child porn is itself technically child porn), the solution is to prevent links being stored in a block, or prevent them being followed. Any decent programmer could write that code in less than five minutes, I should think. The idea that this hack suddenly renders all cryptocurrencies de facto illegal sounds like absurd hysteria aimed at grabbing headlines, or maybe shorting bitcoin stock or otherwise discrediting  it, if that's not too conspiratorial, but – like Facebook – the situation does remind us that it's naive to expect capitalist companies to police themselves.

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robbo203 wrote:

The above all sounds encouraging and positive.  How can it be linked up with recent efforts looking into the Party's reorganisation.  What is happening about the latter?

Haven't you seen the agenda for Conference. Apart fom a couple of joke motions fom Lancaster, that's all thst's going to be discussed. 

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If it was that early it must have been in relation to the first volume. Anyway, here is the abstract thst DAP submitted in January 2015, at the request of one of the co-authors, for the second volume:

Quote:

Chapter AbstractMovement or Monument? The SPGB and the Maximum ProgrammeThis chapter discusses the UK’s oldest revolutionary organisation, the Socialist Party of Great Britain (SPGB), in the post-war era. Founded in 1904, the SPGB reached its peak of membership and influence in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, though ever since has remained a visible and self-styled thorn in the side of organisations situating themselves in the Leninist and anarchist traditions. Viewed by many as a monument to revolutionary purity, it nevertheless developed a considerable reputation for Marxist political education – especially in the field of Marxian economics – which continued after the war.Underpinned by its anti-reformism and infamous ‘hostility clause’ against all other political parties, the SPGB’s sense of being ‘the other’ was emboldened by the rise of the New Left from the 1950s. However, its influence on other thinkers and organisations was sometimes wider than it liked to concede: from for instance, being the originator in Britain of the theory of state capitalism, to its explicit promotion of the idea of socialism or communism as a society without the wages system, any price mechanism, or money. Whilst the former view influenced the group which went on to found the International Socialists/Socialist Workers Party (to which the SPGB has been opposed), the latter was an outlook which found wider resonance on the ‘ultra-left’. This was specifically in the perspectives of the left communist, council communist and anarcho-communist organisations that developed in Britain from the 1970s, and then in the twenty first century in groups such as the Zeitgeist Movement.The distinctive political culture of the SPGB is also examined, along with some key ideological divisions that have emerged within the organisation, including ones that have led to small-scale splits and breakaway movements impacting on other political currents.

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Brian wrote:

The question itself is incomplete for we have no idea what "this thesis" is relating too.

I am afraid we do ! It's that money is not a measure of the use-value of a product (and that he was the first to demonstrate this).

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Immanuel Wallerstein has written some very useful stuff on the origin of capitalism and of how it has always been a world-system which can only be replaced by another world-system (socialism) and so socialism cannot exist in one country but only a form of state-capitalism can,  but I have my doubts whether he has followed his advice here and read Marx's Value, Price and Profit.I say this because on 20 March 1998 he was interviewed in the Belgian paper Le Soir.  In answer to one of the questions he said (my rough translation from French):

Quote:

You easily imagine that if one respected the presuppositions of economic textbooks — an infinity of sellers and an infinity of buyers, all perfectly informed — capitalists would be incapable of making the least profit: consumers would immediately find the lowest price which would not be a centime above the cost of production!

I wrote to him asking if he had been misreported:

Quote:

What surprised me was your answer to the first question in which you were reported as saying that under conditions of perfect competition capitalists would not make any profit. What surprised me is that this is at variance with Marx's view and having read many of your books assumed you regarded yourself as being in the Marxist tradition. Marx, however, set out to explain how profit could arise precisely in conditions of what was later to be called "perfect competition" where commodities exchanged at their values; profit arising out of the process of production (labour power creating a value greater than its own) not on the market by sellers raising their prices. I don't know whether you were misreported or whether in fact this is your view?

To which I received the following surprising — and disappointing — reply on 6 April (in English):

Quote:

No, I was not misquoted

and this:

Quote:

To make a profit, any producer of any item must have the rent of a partial monopoly, and the greater the degree of monopoly, the greater the rate of profit that can be obtained. Of course labor power produces a value greater than its own, but how much greater? It can be greater by a smidgen or greater by a multiple of hundreds. The degree greater has nothing to do with the relations of production but with the state of monopolization of the market.

Of course "monopoly profits" exist but he was saying here that this is the only form of profit, which is at variance with Marx's view expressed in Capital as well as in Value, Price and Profit that profits are made even in the absence of monopoly conditions. Here's what Marx said in the latter (note his specific mention of monopolies as an exception):

Quote:

if supply and demand equilibrate each other, the market prices of commodities will correspond with their natural prices, that is to say with their values, as determined by the respective quantities of labour required for their production. But supply and demand must constantly tend to equilibrate each other, although they do so only by compensating one fluctuation by another, a rise by a fall, and vice versa. If instead of considering only the daily fluctuations you analyze the movement of market prices for longer periods, as Mr. Tooke, for example, has done in his History of Prices, you will find that the fluctuations of market prices, their deviations from values, their ups and downs, paralyze and compensate each other; so that apart from the effect of monopolies and some other modifications I must now pass by, all descriptions of commodities are, on average, sold at their respective values or natural prices.

and

Quote:

If then, speaking broadly, and embracing somewhat longer periods, all descriptions of commodities sell at their respective values, it is nonsense to suppose that profit, not in individual cases; but that the constant and usual profits of different trades spring from the prices of commodities, or selling them at a price over and above their value. The absurdity of this notion becomes evident if it is generalized. What a man would constantly win as a seller he would constantly lose as a purchaser. It would not do to say that there are men who are buyers without being sellers, or consumers without being producers. What these people pay to the producers, they must first get from them for nothing. If a man first takes your money and afterwards returns that money in buying your commodities, you will never enrich yourselves by selling your commodities too dear to that same man. This sort of transaction might diminish a loss, but would never help in realizing a profit.

Yes, to understand the origin of profits, Read Karl Marx!

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I have spoken to the comrade who offered to write a contribution on the Party, and the position was worse than I remembered. He got a positive reply from the one of the authors he wrote to which said they were interested and would he write an abstract of what his contribution would say. He did this and sent it in. Then nothing (not even a rejection). It's clear, then, that a deliberate decision was made to exclude an article on us.

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Yes, judging by this he does seem a bit unbalanced.https://www.dailysabah.com/war-on-terror/2018/03/24/us-backed-kurdish-groups-allied-with-marxist-pkk-group-in-turkey-bolton-saysMarxists under the bed again.

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Is this article any help to you?www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2010s/2013/no-1306-june-2013/will-robots-cause-capitalism-collapse

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As we are not "liberals" we don't need to panic over this:http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2018/03/22/liberals-panic-john-bolton-appointment-national-security-advisor/

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